Ah but if I wanted to nitpick, I could argue that that is indeed not a CRT, because it doesnt employ an electron gun nor include a vacuum tube.
There's vacuum between the electron-emitting structures at the back and the phosphors at the front. An electric potential accelerates the electrons across this gap, providing the energy they need to excite the phosphors. For me, that's close enough to fit the terms "vacuum tube" and "electron gun".
The two main differences between this technology and a "traditional" CRT are:
(1) cold-cathode electron emission rather than hot-cathode (from a heated filament).
(2) One "electron gun" per phosphor dot, rather than a single steered beam.
But the original question was just about a PDA form factor "CRT", not a "hot-cathode raster-scanned CRT"...
flat CRT? I have never heard of such a thing. There are other viable flat-screen technologies, but I fail to see how a cathode ray tube could possibly be fit into a PDA form factor.
Here's one way to do it, called a field-emitter array . Electrons are emitted from a microstructured silicon substrate, then strike phosphors and produce light just like in a standard CRT.
Wow, what an ass. I know at least in BC, Canada, requiring people to work 11 hours a day with only a half-hour lunch break would violate the law, regardless if those people are salaried or not.
Better take a second look at those laws. There's a special bit of legislation dealing with "high-technology professionals", that exempts them from many of the provisions of the Employment Standards Act. Take a look here for the details.
I'm not sure if this particular example would be legal or not, but just about all of the other "overtime"-type regulations don't apply to "high-tech" workers. The idea is that your stock options are supposed to make up for all the unpaid overtime you put in, while your semi-literate CEO pulls in 6 figures for sitting behind a nice desk and watching his screensaver (and/or browsing porn) all day.
Apple should just stick a divide-by-two flip-flop on the CPU's clock pin, then jack up the oscillator frequency until they're MHz-competitive with the x86 world. It wouldn't hurt the performance much, and it's no dirtier than some of the tricks that Intel's played over the years (487SX Coprocessor upgrade, anyone?).
Then there's the quiet fanless iMacs and G4 cubes.
I really wish that there were more fanless computers like the iMac or Cube. Passive (noiseless) cooling is one thing that I've really missed since I traded in my Amiga 500. I've always shared a fairly small living space with my computers, and I just can't sleep with one of these multi-fan x86 monsters grinding away all night. Even the 15W StrongARM-based Netwinder has a small but surprisingly annoying fan in it.
I just wish that Apple made a fanless model somewhere in between the iMac (the built-in monitor's a bit small) and the G4 Cube (too expensive).
And what are the Bussard ramjets? IIRCWIPD all a Bussard collector is a assemblage that collects spaceborne hydrogen atoms.
Take the hydrogen collected into the front of your rocket, feed it through a fusion reactor, then shoot the hot exhaust out the back end of the rocket...
Another contender for "first 8-bit Java VM" is Dallas Semiconductor's collection of embedded Java devices at www.ibutton.com.
There's some neat stuff, like the "tini" board - a small (68-pin SIMM form-factor) embedded computer with 10BaseT ethernet and TCP/IP networking. It can run a web server, as well as Telnet and FTP. It also has a couple of serial ports for interfacing to other components.
Here's a page from spamcop.net (a spam-reporting and filtering service which I highly recommend) that people might find interesting: http://spamcop.net/stats/biggest_source.html.
This is the list of top sources of spam as reported through their service - #1 is UU.net with 43811 reports. #2, a distant second, is sympatico.ca with 3168. Draw your own conclusions.
Your definitions are correct, but the story (despite what the Slashdot headline says) is actually about the "isotopic" (no "r") variety.
Supposedly, pure Si-28 has 60% higher thermal conductivity than natural silicon (92% Si-28, 5% Si-29, 3% Si-30). Dunno if it's true or not, but it's a neat idea.
Re-entry friction is less of a problem if you drop straight down. Something in orbit has a very large horizontal velocity (too lazy to work out the numbers, but roughly the circumference of the earth in 90 minutes), and much of the heat of re-entry is caused by this horizontal velocity.
According to the article she'll only get up to Mach 1.5 [doesn't say if that's relative to the speed of sound at sea level, or to the actual speed of sound in the air she's passing through], and that's quite a bit less then orbital velocity.
Don't RAM chips already have some internal ability to map out bad areas, like the way that IDE/SCSI hard drives come with spare sectors that are automatically mapped in when a regular one fails?
[google]
DRAMs typically improve yield by using spare rows and columns to replace those occupied by defective cells. The repairs are performed using current-blown fuses, laser-blown fuses, or laser-annealed resistor connections. [Coc94] references one case in which memory repair increased the yield from 1% to 51%.
Now, imagine a space station crashing through the atmosphere, heating up to insane temperatures, and falling into the middle of the ocean, where the water temperature stays mostly constant. If you don't think that is going to have a measurable effect on a large chunk of water, you haven't taken any thermo or bio classes...
Oh, please! Let's imagine that when Mir hits, it is at the same temperature as the surface of the sun (5700 K), while the ocean where it lands has a temperature of 280K. Let's say that Mir is made of steel with a total mass of 100,000 kg.
Heat capacity of steel = 447 J/(kg*K) , heat capacity of water = 4169 J/(kg*K).
So the heat energy supplied by the station is (447)*(100000)*(5700 - 280) = 2.42*10^11 J. Dividing by the heat capacity of water, we get a result of 5.8*10^7 kg*K.
In order to calculate a temperature rise, we need to decide how much of the ocean's volume to consider. For the first calculation, consider a cube of water 100m on each side. I hope you will all agree that this is an absolutely tiny fraction of the entire Pacific ocean.
The volume of water in this 100m cube is (100^3) =10^6 m^3, and the density of water is 1000 kg/m^3. Therefore, the mass of water in this cube is 10^9 kg.
So, (deltaT)*(10^9 kg) = 5.8*10^7 kg*K
deltaT = 0.058 K (or 0.10 degF for Americans).
Now take a look at http://www.icess.ucsb.edu/geos/1112.html , a page studying the El Nino phenomenon. Look at the satellite photos on that page, and figure out for yourself how much impact a 0.058 degree temperature rise in a 100m section of the Pacific ocean is going to have. Also note the section in the text which says "On warm sunny days, the surface waters can heat up by as much as 1-2 degrees C during the daytime hours".
Granted, any fish which happens to be at "ground zero" is going to get cooked, but the ecosystem is going to be completely indifferent to the event (at least from a thermodynamic perspective).
p.s. The environmental damage caused by industrial cooling-water is real. However, there you have a continuous source of heat energy rather than a one-time addition of a heated space station.
by tbo (trbeals@interchange.ubc.ca.nospam)
Buddy, I've got news for you. The classical model is wrong. [...]I saw a demonstration of the photoelectric effect in my physics class just the other day...
Which class? I don't remember actually seeing a demo of the photoelectric effect in my UBC physics courses (1991-1995), but I am familiar with the basic principle. I also took a couple of solid-state courses, so I know about bandgaps, potential wells, and such (although I admit I've forgotten a lot of it by now). It doesn't alter the fact that classical electrodynamics is still a perfectly adequate way to describe many real-world situations, particularly when you're at the radio / microwave end of the EM spectrum. You have to choose a model which fits the problem you are studying, and I don't think there are many systems in the human body which work by ejecting electrons out of metals in a vacuum to create a photoelectric current. The closest one I can think of is the one in my original post - visible light interacting with the retina.
What this means is that microwaves don't have sufficient energy to ionize any molecules you'll find in your brain.
If you read my original post, you'll see that I did compare the energy of a microwave photon to that of visible light, reaching a similar conclusion. But who says you have to ionize the molecule?
And while we're at it, if microwaves are not "ionizing radiation", how do you explain what happens if you put a lightbulb or a small neon bulb in a microwave oven? [Kids, don't try this at home. If you do, make sure you put in a big glass of water as a dummy load, and shut off the microwave as soon as you see the light. But don't even try it in the first place]. Guess what - the gas in the bulb ends up getting ionized in a big way! I have a Classical explanation; do you have a Quantum one?
(The photons are of sufficient energy to excite certain vibrational states of water molecules).
So if they have enough energy to vibrate water molecules, maybe they have enough energy to vibrate or bend other molecules? Even if you don't break any chemical bonds, you still might alter the rate at which some enzyme reacts with some other substance. Here, a biochemist would be more useful than a physicist.
So why is it a bad idea to put your head in a microwave, but OK to use a cellphone? Look at the power output on each.
I did, in my original post. My point was to explore the _non-thermal_ effects of microwave radiation (if any).
A physicist can sit down for 5 minutes, and give you a more definite answer than you'll ever get from the biologist.
And half the time, the physicist's answer starts out like "consider a spherical cow..." - simplifying the problem, but sometimes omitting relevant details. 5 minutes with a physicist will certainly give you a good idea of what areas to ignore and what areas might deserve further investigation, but it's dangerous to rely on just the 5-minute answer.
OK, here's one to ponder - _IF_ there are health effects from cellular phones, is there any difference between the "GSM" ones and the "CDMA" ones? Here's why I ask:
1. Cel phones do not emit what is traditionally called "ionizing radiation" (UV, X-ray, gamma ray) - photons with enough energy to knock electrons out of atoms and break chemical bonds. Yes, this type of radiation causes cancer. No, cel phones do not emit it. Period.
2. My cel phone does, however, emit some radiation at a frequency that is capable of effecting electrochemical changes in biological molecules. Specifically, the power LED and LCD backlight emit photons of visible light that interact with my retina. The energy per photon of this radiation is roughly 1/2 of that of the UV at the low end of the "ionizing radiation" spectrum. Let's say a wavelength of 500 nm for "visible", 250 nm for "ionizing". (energy per photon is proportional to 1/wavelength)
3. The "interesting" radiation from the phone is at a frequency of approx. 3 GHz. This gives a wavelength of 10 cm, or 100,000,000 nm. In other words, the energy per photon is 200,000 times less than that of visible light and 400,000 times less than that of "ionizing" radiation.
4. I know that microwave ovens cook food. A cel phone uses a lot less power than a microwave oven. Consider this - it would hurt to stick your hand in a toaster for 5 minutes. That's infrared / visible radiation, with a higher energy per photon than your microwave. Does that mean that all infrared and visible radiation is harmful? Does it mean you will burn your brain if you sit next to a candle? Our bodies contain a lot of water, which has a high heat capacity. We also have circulating blood and an evaporative cooling system which allows us to regulate our temperature. Thermal radiation is only a problem at intensity levels which overload our body's regulating systems.
5. So the question now is, what's left in cel-phone radiation that could cause cancer or other biological effects? This is where I would be interested to hear the opinions of people who know more about these areas:
- Biological systems are quite sensitive to the shape of molecules. Microwave ovens heat food by exciting certain rotational/vibrational modes of water molecules. Is it possible that some interesting biological molecules are tuned so that microwave photons can distort their shape or alter the rate of some chemical reaction?
- Electric or magnetic fields. Instead of the quantum picture of individual photons, consider the classical picture of an electromagnetic wave. A time-varying magnetic field will induce electric currents in a conductive medium. The magnetic field itself will exert a force on moving electrons (Hall effect). Cel phones are easily capable of interfering with nearby electronic devices - some phones make the picture on computer monitors jump around, or produce audible pops and buzzing from cheap radios. The human brain is a rather delicate electrical system. Is it totally unaffected by the same levels of EM fields which interfere with electronic appliances? [I don't know the answer here]
6. If there are any actual interactions according to this last point (which to me seems to be the most likely, _IF_ there's anything there at all), shouldn't the effects be more pronounced with GSM phones than with CDMA ones? As you can see from technical references such as this one, GSM phones use "Time Division Multiple Access" where each one transmits pulses of radiation in a narrow frequency band. Conversely, CDMA phones transmit over a wide frequency range. Given the same total amount of energy being transmitted, a narrower bandwidth means a higher peak intensity of electric and magnetic fields. Therefore, wouldn't the GSM ones be more likely to cause adverse non-thermal effects in surrounding devices?
While I was never sure about the office java thing, I think it was just a rumor, but could have been true.
Oh, there certainly was a "Corel Office for Java". I found an old review of it here for anyone who cares. From what I remember of the development version I tried, it was an impressive Java application but a next-to-useless office suite. It's now residing in the "where are they now?" file, next to Microsoft Bob.
Since there aren't really any signs in the Universe that say "I am perfectly stationary, measure from me"
Actually, there is a pretty good one - the microwave background radiation.
There is a nice picture here which shows the relative temperature of this radiation as seen from earth. It is clearly red-shifted in one direction and blue-shifted in the opposite direction, indicating that the earth is moving rapidly (600 km/s) in the direction of the blue-shift. Some of this velocity is our motion around the sun, some is the sun's motion in our galaxy, but most of the velocity is common to our entire local group of galaxies.
If we were "at rest" in the universe, the microwave background would be uniform in all directions [more precisely, the dipole component would be zero; quadrupole and higher terms would still be present]. However, distant stars and galaxies would still be moving away from us due to the expansion of the universe.
There are some detailed HOWTOs on www.netwinder.org. The Netwinder gives you the option to boot from the network (kernel via TFTP, root filesystem over NFS) so it's actually fairly easy to install new images. Just net-boot from another server, and you can fdisk/format/install your local hard drive. However, before you do this, you should first flash the most recent firmware image. E-mail me privately if you need more help.
p.s. Anyone moderating this thread offtopic - you do know that the Netwinder is a StrongARM/Linux computer, right???
In terms of internal state, it might be almost that simple. What if you did keep a small array of numbers representing the degree of various emotions (happiness, fear, boredom, etc), and let this internal state interact with the "rational" part of your program? If you already had something capable of "rational thought", it shouldn't be that hard to bias its responses based on its internal "emotional" state.
Human emotions are not necessarily complicated. Something as fundamental as "happiness" can be influenced by simple chemicals like Prozac or alcohol, which suggests to me that such emotions are the result of a fairly simple internal state in the brain.
Ultimately, convincing people that your AI "feels" anything is just part of the Turing test. I don't think it will be a big deal, despite what Star Trek might say.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me more of the Monty Python sketch "Elephantoplasty"...
Ah but if I wanted to nitpick, I could argue that that is indeed not a CRT, because it doesnt employ an electron gun nor include a vacuum tube.
There's vacuum between the electron-emitting structures at the back and the phosphors at the front. An electric potential accelerates the electrons across this gap, providing the energy they need to excite the phosphors. For me, that's close enough to fit the terms "vacuum tube" and "electron gun".
The two main differences between this technology and a "traditional" CRT are:
(1) cold-cathode electron emission rather than hot-cathode (from a heated filament).
(2) One "electron gun" per phosphor dot, rather than a single steered beam.
But the original question was just about a PDA form factor "CRT", not a "hot-cathode raster-scanned CRT"...
flat CRT? I have never heard of such a thing. There are other viable flat-screen technologies, but I fail to see how a cathode ray tube could possibly be fit into a PDA form factor.
Here's one way to do it, called a field-emitter array . Electrons are emitted from a microstructured silicon substrate, then strike phosphors and produce light just like in a standard CRT.
Wow, what an ass. I know at least in BC, Canada, requiring people to work 11 hours a day with only a half-hour lunch break would violate the law, regardless if those people are salaried or not.
Better take a second look at those laws. There's a special bit of legislation dealing with "high-technology professionals", that exempts them from many of the provisions of the Employment Standards Act. Take a look here for the details.
I'm not sure if this particular example would be legal or not, but just about all of the other "overtime"-type regulations don't apply to "high-tech" workers. The idea is that your stock options are supposed to make up for all the unpaid overtime you put in, while your semi-literate CEO pulls in 6 figures for sitting behind a nice desk and watching his screensaver (and/or browsing porn) all day.
How about the Apple ad that ran just after Microsoft finaly launched the much-hyped Windows 95? It said simply:
C:\ONGRTLNS.W95
Apple should just stick a divide-by-two flip-flop on the CPU's clock pin, then jack up the oscillator frequency until they're MHz-competitive with the x86 world. It wouldn't hurt the performance much, and it's no dirtier than some of the tricks that Intel's played over the years (487SX Coprocessor upgrade, anyone?).
Then there's the quiet fanless iMacs and G4 cubes.
I really wish that there were more fanless computers like the iMac or Cube. Passive (noiseless) cooling is one thing that I've really missed since I traded in my Amiga 500. I've always shared a fairly small living space with my computers, and I just can't sleep with one of these multi-fan x86 monsters grinding away all night. Even the 15W StrongARM-based Netwinder has a small but surprisingly annoying fan in it.
I just wish that Apple made a fanless model somewhere in between the iMac (the built-in monitor's a bit small) and the G4 Cube (too expensive).
And what are the Bussard ramjets? IIRCWIPD all a Bussard collector is a assemblage that collects spaceborne hydrogen atoms.
Take the hydrogen collected into the front of your rocket, feed it through a fusion reactor, then shoot the hot exhaust out the back end of the rocket...
Another option, in the "pure math" category, is the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search at www.mersenne.org.
Another contender for "first 8-bit Java VM" is Dallas Semiconductor's collection of embedded Java devices at www.ibutton.com.
There's some neat stuff, like the "tini" board - a small (68-pin SIMM form-factor) embedded computer with 10BaseT ethernet and TCP/IP networking. It can run a web server, as well as Telnet and FTP. It also has a couple of serial ports for interfacing to other components.
Here's a page from spamcop.net (a spam-reporting and filtering service which I highly recommend) that people might find interesting: http://spamcop.net/stats/biggest_source.html.
This is the list of top sources of spam as reported through their service - #1 is UU.net with 43811 reports. #2, a distant second, is sympatico.ca with 3168. Draw your own conclusions.
Your definitions are correct, but the story (despite what the Slashdot headline says) is actually about the "isotopic" (no "r") variety.
Supposedly, pure Si-28 has 60% higher thermal conductivity than natural silicon (92% Si-28, 5% Si-29, 3% Si-30). Dunno if it's true or not, but it's a neat idea.
Upsidaisium.
Re-entry friction is less of a problem if you drop straight down. Something in orbit has a very large horizontal velocity (too lazy to work out the numbers, but roughly the circumference of the earth in 90 minutes), and much of the heat of re-entry is caused by this horizontal velocity.
According to the article she'll only get up to Mach 1.5 [doesn't say if that's relative to the speed of sound at sea level, or to the actual speed of sound in the air she's passing through], and that's quite a bit less then orbital velocity.
I'd suggest one slight change to your post:
Fault tolerance now exists for memory ( ECC RAM ), storage (RAID), and communication (redundant NICs).
Don't RAM chips already have some internal ability to map out bad areas, like the way that IDE/SCSI hard drives come with spare sectors that are automatically mapped in when a regular one fails?
s 294-4/project1/dram-test.html
[google]
DRAMs typically improve yield by using spare rows and columns to replace those occupied by defective cells. The repairs are performed using current-blown fuses, laser-blown fuses, or laser-annealed resistor connections. [Coc94] references one case in which memory repair increased the yield from 1% to 51%.
from http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rfromm/Courses/SP96/c
Actually, most people thought that the earth flyby of the Cassini probe was the object of Nostradamus' prophecy.
Now, imagine a space station crashing through the atmosphere, heating up to insane temperatures, and falling into the middle of the ocean, where the water temperature stays mostly constant. If you don't think that is going to have a measurable effect on a large chunk of water, you haven't taken any thermo or bio classes...
Oh, please! Let's imagine that when Mir hits, it is at the same temperature as the surface of the sun (5700 K), while the ocean where it lands has a temperature of 280K. Let's say that Mir is made of steel with a total mass of 100,000 kg.
Heat capacity of steel = 447 J/(kg*K) , heat capacity of water = 4169 J/(kg*K).
So the heat energy supplied by the station is (447)*(100000)*(5700 - 280) = 2.42*10^11 J. Dividing by the heat capacity of water, we get a result of 5.8*10^7 kg*K.
In order to calculate a temperature rise, we need to decide how much of the ocean's volume to consider. For the first calculation, consider a cube of water 100m on each side. I hope you will all agree that this is an absolutely tiny fraction of the entire Pacific ocean.
The volume of water in this 100m cube is (100^3) =10^6 m^3, and the density of water is 1000 kg/m^3. Therefore, the mass of water in this cube is 10^9 kg.
So, (deltaT)*(10^9 kg) = 5.8*10^7 kg*K
deltaT = 0.058 K (or 0.10 degF for Americans).
Now take a look at http://www.icess.ucsb.edu/geos/1112.html , a page studying the El Nino phenomenon. Look at the satellite photos on that page, and figure out for yourself how much impact a 0.058 degree temperature rise in a 100m section of the Pacific ocean is going to have. Also note the section in the text which says "On warm sunny days, the surface waters can heat up by as much as 1-2 degrees C during the daytime hours".
Granted, any fish which happens to be at "ground zero" is going to get cooked, but the ecosystem is going to be completely indifferent to the event (at least from a thermodynamic perspective).
p.s. The environmental damage caused by industrial cooling-water is real. However, there you have a continuous source of heat energy rather than a one-time addition of a heated space station.
by tbo (trbeals@interchange.ubc.ca.nospam)
Buddy, I've got news for you. The classical model is wrong. [...]I saw a demonstration of the photoelectric effect in my physics class just the other day...
Which class? I don't remember actually seeing a demo of the photoelectric effect in my UBC physics courses (1991-1995), but I am familiar with the basic principle. I also took a couple of solid-state courses, so I know about bandgaps, potential wells, and such (although I admit I've forgotten a lot of it by now). It doesn't alter the fact that classical electrodynamics is still a perfectly adequate way to describe many real-world situations, particularly when you're at the radio / microwave end of the EM spectrum. You have to choose a model which fits the problem you are studying, and I don't think there are many systems in the human body which work by ejecting electrons out of metals in a vacuum to create a photoelectric current. The closest one I can think of is the one in my original post - visible light interacting with the retina.
What this means is that microwaves don't have sufficient energy to ionize any molecules you'll find in your brain.
If you read my original post, you'll see that I did compare the energy of a microwave photon to that of visible light, reaching a similar conclusion. But who says you have to ionize the molecule?
And while we're at it, if microwaves are not "ionizing radiation", how do you explain what happens if you put a lightbulb or a small neon bulb in a microwave oven? [Kids, don't try this at home. If you do, make sure you put in a big glass of water as a dummy load, and shut off the microwave as soon as you see the light. But don't even try it in the first place]. Guess what - the gas in the bulb ends up getting ionized in a big way! I have a Classical explanation; do you have a Quantum one?
(The photons are of sufficient energy to excite certain vibrational states of water molecules).
So if they have enough energy to vibrate water molecules, maybe they have enough energy to vibrate or bend other molecules? Even if you don't break any chemical bonds, you still might alter the rate at which some enzyme reacts with some other substance. Here, a biochemist would be more useful than a physicist.
So why is it a bad idea to put your head in a microwave, but OK to use a cellphone? Look at the power output on each.
I did, in my original post. My point was to explore the _non-thermal_ effects of microwave radiation (if any).
A physicist can sit down for 5 minutes, and give you a more definite answer than you'll ever get from the biologist.
And half the time, the physicist's answer starts out like "consider a spherical cow..." - simplifying the problem, but sometimes omitting relevant details. 5 minutes with a physicist will certainly give you a good idea of what areas to ignore and what areas might deserve further investigation, but it's dangerous to rely on just the 5-minute answer.
OK, here's one to ponder - _IF_ there are health effects from cellular phones, is there any difference between the "GSM" ones and the "CDMA" ones? Here's why I ask:
1. Cel phones do not emit what is traditionally called "ionizing radiation" (UV, X-ray, gamma ray) - photons with enough energy to knock electrons out of atoms and break chemical bonds. Yes, this type of radiation causes cancer. No, cel phones do not emit it. Period.
2. My cel phone does, however, emit some radiation at a frequency that is capable of effecting electrochemical changes in biological molecules. Specifically, the power LED and LCD backlight emit photons of visible light that interact with my retina. The energy per photon of this radiation is roughly 1/2 of that of the UV at the low end of the "ionizing radiation" spectrum. Let's say a wavelength of 500 nm for "visible", 250 nm for "ionizing". (energy per photon is proportional to 1/wavelength)
3. The "interesting" radiation from the phone is at a frequency of approx. 3 GHz. This gives a wavelength of 10 cm, or 100,000,000 nm. In other words, the energy per photon is 200,000 times less than that of visible light and 400,000 times less than that of "ionizing" radiation.
4. I know that microwave ovens cook food. A cel phone uses a lot less power than a microwave oven. Consider this - it would hurt to stick your hand in a toaster for 5 minutes. That's infrared / visible radiation, with a higher energy per photon than your microwave. Does that mean that all infrared and visible radiation is harmful? Does it mean you will burn your brain if you sit next to a candle? Our bodies contain a lot of water, which has a high heat capacity. We also have circulating blood and an evaporative cooling system which allows us to regulate our temperature. Thermal radiation is only a problem at intensity levels which overload our body's regulating systems.
5. So the question now is, what's left in cel-phone radiation that could cause cancer or other biological effects? This is where I would be interested to hear the opinions of people who know more about these areas:
- Biological systems are quite sensitive to the shape of molecules. Microwave ovens heat food by exciting certain rotational/vibrational modes of water molecules. Is it possible that some interesting biological molecules are tuned so that microwave photons can distort their shape or alter the rate of some chemical reaction?
- Electric or magnetic fields. Instead of the quantum picture of individual photons, consider the classical picture of an electromagnetic wave. A time-varying magnetic field will induce electric currents in a conductive medium. The magnetic field itself will exert a force on moving electrons (Hall effect). Cel phones are easily capable of interfering with nearby electronic devices - some phones make the picture on computer monitors jump around, or produce audible pops and buzzing from cheap radios. The human brain is a rather delicate electrical system. Is it totally unaffected by the same levels of EM fields which interfere with electronic appliances? [I don't know the answer here]
6. If there are any actual interactions according to this last point (which to me seems to be the most likely, _IF_ there's anything there at all), shouldn't the effects be more pronounced with GSM phones than with CDMA ones? As you can see from technical references such as this one, GSM phones use "Time Division Multiple Access" where each one transmits pulses of radiation in a narrow frequency band. Conversely, CDMA phones transmit over a wide frequency range. Given the same total amount of energy being transmitted, a narrower bandwidth means a higher peak intensity of electric and magnetic fields. Therefore, wouldn't the GSM ones be more likely to cause adverse non-thermal effects in surrounding devices?
This isn't just a Literature prize, it's also a Darwin Award.
While I was never sure about the office java thing, I think it was just a rumor, but could have been true.
Oh, there certainly was a "Corel Office for Java". I found an old review of it here for anyone who cares. From what I remember of the development version I tried, it was an impressive Java application but a next-to-useless office suite. It's now residing in the "where are they now?" file, next to Microsoft Bob.
Since there aren't really any signs in the Universe that say "I am perfectly stationary, measure from me"
Actually, there is a pretty good one - the microwave background radiation.
There is a nice picture here which shows the relative temperature of this radiation as seen from earth. It is clearly red-shifted in one direction and blue-shifted in the opposite direction, indicating that the earth is moving rapidly (600 km/s) in the direction of the blue-shift. Some of this velocity is our motion around the sun, some is the sun's motion in our galaxy, but most of the velocity is common to our entire local group of galaxies.
If we were "at rest" in the universe, the microwave background would be uniform in all directions [more precisely, the dipole component would be zero; quadrupole and higher terms would still be present]. However, distant stars and galaxies would still be moving away from us due to the expansion of the universe.
There are some detailed HOWTOs on www.netwinder.org. The Netwinder gives you the option to boot from the network (kernel via TFTP, root filesystem over NFS) so it's actually fairly easy to install new images. Just net-boot from another server, and you can fdisk/format/install your local hard drive. However, before you do this, you should first flash the most recent firmware image. E-mail me privately if you need more help.
p.s. Anyone moderating this thread offtopic - you do know that the Netwinder is a StrongARM/Linux computer, right???
In terms of internal state, it might be almost that simple. What if you did keep a small array of numbers representing the degree of various emotions (happiness, fear, boredom, etc), and let this internal state interact with the "rational" part of your program? If you already had something capable of "rational thought", it shouldn't be that hard to bias its responses based on its internal "emotional" state.
Human emotions are not necessarily complicated. Something as fundamental as "happiness" can be influenced by simple chemicals like Prozac or alcohol, which suggests to me that such emotions are the result of a fairly simple internal state in the brain.
Ultimately, convincing people that your AI "feels" anything is just part of the Turing test. I don't think it will be a big deal, despite what Star Trek might say.